


When We Orbit a Star, We Call it a Sun.

by Silverfern500



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Bad Wolf, Beauty and the Beast Elements, F/M, Short, Sweet, The Golden Axe elements, The Little Mermaid Elements, exploring all rose references through eleven and twelve, fairytale, fairytale riffs, little red riding hood elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-05
Updated: 2017-07-19
Packaged: 2018-09-06 15:56:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8759473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silverfern500/pseuds/Silverfern500
Summary: Short insights to Rose Tyler and The Bad Wolf throughout the timeline.She never really disappeared.Chapters inspired by various fairytales.1. Beauty & The Beast2. The Little Mermaid3. Little Red Riding Hood4. The Honest Woodcutter(also note these shorts very much revolve around The Bad Wolf and her being her own entity at times - specifically starting after first chapter)





	1. The Initial Supernova

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A star, which has a planet in its orbit, is considered a sun.  
> Which would leave quite a mess if burnt out.
> 
> Begging the question: At what point would a star, considered a sun, go supernova?
> 
> "I'm burning up a sun, just to say goodbye"
> 
>  -------------------
> 
> The Enchantment Never Breaks, the Rose Wilts - Beauty and the Beast

The rose started wilting the moment the star burnt out of the sky.  
Even when all the stars started disappearing, it was the only one that mattered.  
That gift he gave to her, that star, by using it to say goodbye....  
Sometimes, on the loneliest of nights, she would look out from her window and wonder just which small pocket of darkness to focus on.  
Those patches in the sky seemed like the nothingness that ate within her. An emptiness that sank.  
While somewhere up there, her Doctor took the light out. 

Sometimes he would hover in his world and keep the doors open, eyes seeking the black.  
And a shooting star would flash across Pete's World for her to watch through streaming tears.  
And another rose petal would fall from the display on his console.


	2. Part of Two Universes Collapsing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She was offered a chance to be part of the stars.  
> To save him, she had to give herself over to them.  
> If, the Timelord ever left her, her heart would break, and she'd have to pay that price in full.  
> She could retain herself only by denying him. She could return to her life.  
> Or she would wind up as stardust, in the end.
> 
> The Terrible Price and Tragic Ending (of) - The Little Mermaid

For the first 19 years of her life, nothing happened. The sun rose and fell. She went to work, went home.  
Watched nonsense on the telly, Nevermind the Buzzcocks and Eurovision and whatever talk show was on.  
Whether Rose wished for more, who could ever tell?  
She had a job, had her mum. Had a boyfriend to have chips and drinks with.  
Got the Bronze in Gymnastics once.  
Maybe she was always waiting for the chance to run.

She traded everything she knew for a madman in a blue box.  
For the universe. She'd trade her world for an entire universe full of them.  
Traded her life for the Time Vortex.

The Bad Wolf could save The Doctor.  
The Bad Wolf could save The Doctor, and Jack,  
But only The Doctor could save Rose.

\----

With as little of the Wolf left in her as possible, Rose could still see through the galaxies from Pete's World.  
A supernova far from The Milky Way.  
She could shrug the tingling warning off as a shiver, but she couldn't ignore the headaches, when whole constellations began to fade.  
In a world in trouble and without her Doctor, with only an echo of what she'd traded herself for, how could Rose Tyler remain Rose.  
But the Wolf.

Together with the wolf, Rose could help Torchwood.  
They split apart small entryways like hidden doors in the fabric of reality.  
Like cracks in the universe, like traveling the Time Vortex.

If Rose couldn't make it to the right timeline, all was lost.  
In opening the rifts, in making it back, if only to be too late each time,  
Rose was bargaining away all her Time.  
Every forever she'd bought in for with the Doctor.  
Every minute like a poker chip on a cosmic game of cards.

And then he died.

And only the Wolf remained.

\----

The Doctor chose to leave her to live her life in Pete's World, in the end.  
Fixed points. Fabric of time and space to repair.

If only he'd known.

The girl stood on the beach, this Rose who was no longer Rose, with the Timelord who was no longer a Timelord.  
And the Wolf, particles of the Vortex, clumping together against the Delta Flows of the Vortex.

For only The Doctor could have saved Rose.


	3. Day will Rise and Drown the Moon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We are always on our way to moments, whether we know what we're searching for or not.  
> Whether we can see certain moments for what they are, when we do reach them.
> 
> Everything A Big Bad Wolf Could Want - Little Red Riding Hood

Howling, howling through time. Like wind and space and matter circling, melding and parting, endlessly.  
She was ideas, memories and old stories. Folksongs and footprints in the snow.  
Sometimes she went backwards, she became the nudge to buy a Red Bicycle, or to leave BAD WOLF  
Graffitied on a sign post.  
  
Sometimes she went forward, very far.  
Never escaping where she must be, only... straying.  
A man with a face, borrowed from Pompeii. A man with this changing face, but the same TARDIS.  
He plays her Leitmotif on a guitar. It sounds strange, reverberating through her atoms. It looks funny. She rolls through the gravel outside and laughs, a mad, deep barking.  
Lost in the Nevada desert.  
  
Sometimes she catches up to him, flying alongside him. Catching up with the TARDIS. Sharing.  
They laugh together.  
She is there when the Doctor, with his new face, plays tenant on earth. Sharing his mind with a man named Craig.  
Sharing a fleeting glimpse of a girl the Wolf has forgotten.  
It burns. Trying to remember is like holding onto a comet.  
It rips her apart and she scatters.  
He remembers her then.  
  
In the orange jumpsuit tucked away from his journey into the Pit.  
He wore it on Mars, the Moon, Earth...  
But then, it was mostly coincidence.  
Like the little doll in his pocket, with the blonde hair and pink shirt, so familiar.  
  
She travels.  
When she sees the Magnetic Clamps from Torchwood, in the Black Archives, she whines.  
_"I am the Bad Wolf. I create myself."_  
_" **Rose** , you've got to stop this!"_  
  
It howls inside her head. Rose. Rose. Rose Tyler.  
She's whipped, pulled violently by the past.  
This stranger's words she can barely make out. Someone. Someone he likes.  
The TARDIS is muttering like a worried mother. She yanks the Wolf the rest of the way through, settling her in the timestream.  
For a moment she is Rose again. The shop girl.  
Through a flood of anguish and surprise that leaves her still. Rose barely hears The Doctor. His frightened thanks and guilt.  
As the Bad Wolf thrashes to free herself, the TARDIS lets her slip.The Wolf flees.

Hurling back, reeling back. She writes the name she's forgotten. Names The Rose & Crown. Becomes floral print and lush rose bushes.  
She burrows deep.  
Watching the turn of the universe as it spins past her. Waiting. Waiting for Lake Silencio. Waiting for another death the Timelord will escape.  
He never did go back and help little Rose with her homework.  
  
Though it was too late to dwell on that.

 

\----

" _The **oldest story in the universe** , this one or any other. // **Boy and girl fall in love** , get **separated by events** , war, politics, **accidents in time**. Since they’ve been yearning for each other // **across time and space** // **across dimensions**! // It’s a **love** story!_ "

\----

 

It's time. The Wolf has chased The Doctor far enough. She knows where he is going.  
The one point he cannot evade...

There she is. There she waits.

\--

The Moment has a consciousness. Of course it is Her.  
Who else would it be? This precious, pivotal Moment? But the Big, Bad, Wolf.  
Whose eyes glow golden, as she sits atop the box and watches.  
Not The Doctor. Fancies himself a War Doctor, this one.  
Oh, her wit is coming back. Her wit, and her love. Her grin is feral.

She knows his end. She can recount his beginning. Where it all could go from here.  
She sees him, war-torn and ragged. In that wonderful leather jacket. Which smelled of spice and electricity as they had danced...  
The night he counts how many children were on Gallifrey.  
She tells him of it. Of him and her. Though she cannot see which direction he is going.

  
In her opinion, it takes a great man to light a fire, and a lesser man to let it burn around him. The War Doctor doesn't ask her.  
She need only guide him. Guide them. To help them through.  
Her Doctors. To protect. From the time she became The Bad Wolf to protect _her_ Doctor, to the last centuries. Leading him here.  
Hiding away in a corner to watch. Hiding from memory and sight. If only they choose the path that won't break her heart.  
The echo of the girl inside the wolf, who loved the boy inside the timelord.  
Who must trick him through the War Doctor, through the one they'll all forget. Showing them war.  
Fear. Fire. Death.  
  
Rose laughs, she bites her lip and rocks in her joy. She's lured them here, and led them all astray from the path they've followed.  
And the one. The one with the long brown coat and the brown hair she knew so well. Well, once.  
He says her name. Not her old name, not Rose. Bad Wolf. In disguise.

The Moment, in the cottage, at the end of the path.  
  


\----  
  
And she deserves it, doesn't she. When she returns to the diner. Where the man with the pepper hair plays her Leitmotif.


	4. No One Sings Like You Anymore, Black Hole Sun

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Exhaustion is a very odd phenomenon.  
> Sometimes it is the exact breaking point which drives us towards action. The way the tethered dog snaps.  
> Revolution, survival, change. Kindness.  
> Kindness in all things, without selfish motivation.
> 
> "The fairy dove into the river and brought out a golden axe. 'Is this the one you lost?', he asked. The woodsman shook his head. 'No, it is not. I wish that it was. Mine was not so fine as that one. But mine was a good, sturdy axe, well-suited to my work.'"
> 
> Hope For The Honest Man - The Golden Axe (The Honest Woodcutter)

She followed him closely now, in respects to his loneliness. For the wolf was just as solitary and loyal and lonely, if not more so.  
She paid attention to the children he brought on. Here and there. Like the red and plastic ones who traveled with the gangly, raggedy one, his TARDIS being the one to so rudely drag her out of the vortex (with the TARDIS' emergency interface). Until he lured her back with her notes on a guitar and a Glaswegian voice. So now she follows closer. Wondering about the children, here and there.

The girl with no heartbeat. No, when she had a heartbeat. Without. Wrong like so many before her. But brave. Brave like Katarina.  
The girl who heard her in the New New Forest. But then The Wolf cared not for such children, save curiosity.  
Poor Jamie who could have lived well and full off the countryside where she ran with him from afar.  
The plastic man and woman. Not plastic, were plastic. With their flat and their books and their paradoxes.  
Entirely overrated. Whether that was the opinion of an estate-girl-who-was or The Wolf which ran, she did not care to consider.  
Ace, The Wolf respected from a distance. As one touched by primordial forces can only respect those within whom they recognize themselves.  
And avoid.

There's something about the man with the pepper hair. Without hope, no.  
Yet still clinging to belief. Belief in what, in when, in who.  
In miniscopes and years that never were. In Romana, in Adric, perhaps.  
In her.

The years drove her insane, and all the while she ran.

There's something that reminds her of an old friend in Bill.  
There's also something in chips and in her mate Shareen and in stubbornness.  
She didn't do the graffiti in Mars but appreciates graffiti and foreshadowing through time nonetheless.  
She appreciates it less on homeboxes and the Diamond Cliff.

She thinks she'd like to burn that orange spacesuit. If it didn't smell like time and coming home. If home was a place she'd never been.  
She's run with Jamie and Clara, and runs with Bill where the locusts hunt.  
And all the while she captures the stars in her eyes and between her jaws.

The stars she once almost lost, and in saving them, lost everything.

But The Doctor, he never asks for that which is not already, always, rightfully his.

The TARDIS is always excited, always indignant, nearly always breathing. She runs and she protects and she mourns.  
Together they watch the man with the pepper hair as he lies on his back.  
Their conversational hum a lower register in their link.  
The TARDIS surges with his memory, with the regeneration.  
He'd been producing Lindos hormones for a while by then.  
Curious, and unusual.

And for just a moment she let him into the telepathic conversation going on around him.  
For just a glimpse and a brush of understanding, but too much.

He woke, erratic and the energy, too much. Too many different energies in the one room.  
This time she was not eager nor glad to flee, but must or be scattered.

As alone and frantic he staggered out into the snow,  
The cloister bells ringing out and mourning for him.

Timetravel is strange, for certain, she mused.  
It was no longer time for her. Or, it was always time for her.  
But what was to happen just then was not her place.  
Wandering, following a scent without realizing it,  
Into a sunny, gentle forest. She sat on an old stone wall.

As a traveler with blonde hair stepped up and over a place where the wall had crumbled.  
The wolf smiled. The air smelled of fresh dirt and chloroplast and Lindos.  
And of a kindness which would go on giving, forever.  
And so she hopped down and shook out her hair... and even as the woman turned towards her,  
The Wolf raced back and back

To the man who never asked, the man with no hope, but with so much belief that it had once drowned her.  
And as he closed his eyes and hoped for stars, she closed her own and gave every star to him.  
Galaxies and nebulas and clusters, every star she ever saved like phosphenes behind his eyelids.  
And even if his consciousness was too far away to notice,  
he would never be - entirely - without hope, without witness, without reward.


End file.
